The present invention relates generally to remote access to filesystem data in a distributed environment, and more particularly to filesystem object encoding to support remote access in a multilingual distributed environment.
Today""s major operating systems offer flexibility in naming filesystem objects. Some operating systems offer almost limitless length and varying character combinations when naming filesystem objects, e.g., names for directories, sub-directories, folders, and files. For example, the historical xe2x80x9ceight-dot-threexe2x80x9d naming convention restriction of DOS computers is no longer strictly utilized. By way of example, users on Japanese systems are able to name filesystem objects with Kanji characters, while users of Russian systems are able to name filesystem objects using Cyrillic characters. While improving usability on an individual system level, storage administrators face challenges in managing these filesystem objects in a distributed environment. A main challenge arises from the fact that the different languages span different coded character sets.
Network file access protocols have emerged that allow access to file system objects that reside on a remote machine. However, these protocols often restrict the character set of the names of the filesystem objects. Further, the client and the server may be required to run the same operating system in the same language. For example, when an English Windows 95 system maps to a network drive of a Japanese Windows 95 system, the user on the English system is unable to access any file or directory on the Japanese system that contains Japanese characters in its name due to the inability to render the Japanese characters on the English system or, more seriously, the inability to recognize that the filesystem objects exist at all.
In order to illustrate the problem more particularly, FIG. 1a provides a screen capture shot (i.e., screen shot) of filesystem objects viewed locally on a Chinese machine. An open sub-directory 10 contains Chinese characters in its name, as well as files and sub-directories 12 with Chinese characters in their names. When an attempt is made to view the same sub-directory 10 on a remote English machine, problems result, as shown in the screen shot of FIG. 1b. As illustrated by the screen shot of FIG. 1b, the filesystem object 10 having the Chinese characters in its name is not displayed correctly, while its sub-directories and files 12 are not even recognized as existing in the English machine, and thus, are not displayed at all. The inability to recognize all filesystem objects severely hampers achieving complete and accurate system management.
Accordingly, a need exists for access and management capabilities for filesystem objects regardless of the operating system platform and language environment on which the filesystem objects reside. The present invention meets these needs.
The present invention provides system and method aspects for filesystem management in a multilingual distributed computer environment. A system includes at least one server system for storing filesystem objects. A remote system is further included for remotely performing filesystem management operations on the filesystem objects of the at least one server system. At least one client system is provided for the at least one server system to support remote access to the filesystem objects by the remote system through a client agent, the client agent providing Unicode encoding of filesystem objects passed between the remote system and the at least one server system to ensure conversion of filesystem objects to a universal translation form, wherein proper recognition and management of filesystem objects occur in the remote system of the multilingual distributed computer environment.
The present invention allows a storage administrator to access and manage remote filesystem objects regardless of the operating system platform and language environment on which the filesystem objects reside. The invention incorporates Unicode to encode characters in a distributed environment to allow crossing of operating system platform boundaries, as well as language boundaries, during remote system management. These and other advantages of the aspects of the invention will be more fully understood in conjunction with the following detailed description and accompanying drawings.